Are you fed up with the Fed (Federal Reserve System) and Treasury Secretary, or growing weary working at a job for someone else’s dream and financial benefit?
I was, before I launched by own dream green business and starting making time to smell the flowers and eat the strawberry.
Here are 5 tips to start a green business based on my experiences and book, ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet before Profits:
(1) Follow your Earth Mission.
Wealth without purpose is poverty. Who wants to be the richest person in the cemetery? Turn your passions and sense of purpose into an enterprise. Ecopreneurs craft an “Earth Mission” to use their business as a catalyst make the world a better place, often defining success qualitatively, not quantitatively.(2) Operate your green business with a triple bottom line: people, planet and (some) profits.
Rather than the purpose of business to simply generate profits, sustainable businesses thrive in a restoration ECOnomy based on restoring or enhancing the planet, providing fair and equitable relationships amongst all stakeholders, and generate profits to sustain the business and its mission (in various ways, to make the world a better place).
(3) Thrive in abundance, not dwell on scarcity — or fear.
Ecopreneurs create enterprises that prosper by focusing on the abundance in our world, like solar energy. Many businesses are completely powered with renewable energy and seek to harvest and share the surplus, whether from their agricultural operation or when restoring ecological services once provided for free by nature. Decisions are made because of opportunities, not out of fear.(4) Be place-based and local.
The ultimate competitive advantage is to feature what other globally-minded businesses cannot: the unique resources, attributes or qualities of your local community. By staying local, enterprising ecopreneurs help revitalize their community and foster greater cohesion, economic cooperation, and stability not beholden to global financial fantasies or fossil fuel price gyrations based on fickle energy intelligence. Live local, buy local, sell local.(5) Understand the difference between “good debt” and “bad debt.”
While the American obsession with a growth economy fueled by debt continues to rage, many ecopreneurs have discovered the immense freedom, control and satisfaction that comes from minding your own business. Creating a quality of life through a business that seeks to maximize happiness and meaningfulness for its owner often translates to creative and frugal approaches to operating a business that doesn’t demand piles of debt, the extension of credit, or federal bailouts to survive.
Today, our business produces more energy than it uses, provides an immensely satisfying quality of life, helps restore the biological systems on which we depend, and fosters community (not more money in a “retirement account” to be frittered away by means beyond my control). My wife and I, on how we operate our Inn Serendipity B&B, feel fortunate in many more ways than money could ever define.
What tips do you have to share? How do you consider yourself fortunate?
John:
I think this post is a bit naive and certainly limited in scope. I have no quarrel with local-centered enterprises, nor the focus on the need for companies to identify all areas in which they can employ sustainable and renewable resources.
But without a clear focus on profitability (and the growth of same) any business, whether eco- or not, will not survive. This leads to missed opportunities in providing stable employment for others and deploying the resources, ever-growing, to make a difference in the environmental agenda.
Certain laws of commerce cannot be broken, and profitability is one of those. If we want to continue to do good, we will need the resources that profits provide in order to do so.
John,
I love your post. I think Mike Chadima, in his comment about it, misses the main points you are making (and made beautifully in your book), and that is that you have created jobs (yours and your wife’s most importantly, and others as well), that you have created exactly the life you want, and that your business is sustainable in people and planet first, but also in profit. There is no reason you need to create a franchising opportunity or pursue interminable growth in order to provide for yourself and your family, create jobs in your community, and keep your footprint small. Your business model may be different than that of other ecopreneurs, but you are 1) in business, 2) employing yourself, 3) making money, and all the while, and most importantly to many of us 4) making the world a better place in the process.
The one thing I believe about the coming green economy is that we’re going to bend if not break all the old rules.
Scott Cooney
Author of
Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur
(“Ecopreneur’s Guide” on Facebook)
Excellent information…thank you. It seems to me that the key is balance. Certainly there are businesses that have forsaken the planet in the quest for profit, and, that’s not sustainable…and, a business that forgoes profit may be said to not be a business…that is more of a charity…and, that is probably not sustainable either. Just like many other aspects of life, holding a balance produces the win-win outcome.
Warmly,
Jim
http://www.JamesOatesIII.com
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